"POETS' CORNER"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 16

"POETS' CORNER"

POETS’ Corner, a series of Sunday programmes which will shortly go the rounds of the ZB stations, sets out to dispel the illusion that poetry is highbrow fare and unacceptable to the average listener. Recent years have seen a revival of verse speaking, and this has led to the recording of a wide range of English poetry by some of the best known actors and actresses on the English and American stage. The late John Drinkwater was one of the keenest advocates of this revival of the art of reading poetry aloud, and observed once that he had heard a young woman of 20 stand up on a platform: in Glasgow and. by saying a lyric by W..B. Yeats excite a crowd of 2000 people as deeply as, could any master of the piano or violin. In Poets’ Corner, listeners will hear such famous stage stars as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Henry Ainley and Basil

Maine reading well known poems, and among the poets who will read their own verse, will be John Drinkwater, Sir Henry Newbolt, Christopher Hassal. and Walter de la Mare. The programme will not consist solely of spoken matter, but will include musical settings of many well known poems. In the first programme, for instance, listeners will hear Byron’s famous "So We’ll Go No More a-Roving" read first by John Gielgud and then sung by Dennis Noble in the musical setting by Maude Valerie Winte, In view of the fact that no attempt is being made to "educate" listeners, and that there will be neither biographies of poets nor discussions on the various schools of verse, it will be interesting to note the reactions of listeners. Poets’ Corner will start from Station 4ZB on Sunday, October 12, and from the other ZB stations on successive Sundays,